In a nutshell:
Why the protest rules
1: LONG Tapered tip and tail. Anyone who's ridden a spatula, praxis powder, armada arg, normal protest or similar knows that with the widest portion of the ski underfoot or just in front of it, there's no reason for the tip to get wider. You get float. In fact, making the tip narrower towards the end keeps the ski from hooking in crust, sierra cement, old warm rotten pow styrofoam windboard........whatever. This along with rocker also moves the pivot point under foot so you're smearing rather that pivoting around the front of the ski. Everyone who's skied spatulas knows this and everyone knows what smearing turns is at this point. Truly god's gift to tree skiing and techy pillow lines. And by god I mean mckonkey
2. NO STUPID SIDECUT. This where every single ski company but a very few have fucked it all up. Skiing spatulas on hard snow sucks balls. You have to stay on your heels and ride the tails to get some edge contact while turning. No one denies this and that's where skis like the dp lotus 138, armada arg, and praxis protest got it right. Even just that little bit of sidecut means you can chill out on your shins while crusing around on hard snow rather than constantly finding the weird safe zone on a full reverse/reverse. Where everyone blows it (IMO) is when they try to put the same sidecut dimensions as a 'normal' ski crammed into a short space to maintain tip and tail taper. That's where you get the sub 20m radii like the JJ, S7, rp112. Is it a powder ski or a fucking snowblade? It's both! It's "playing it safe" by sticking with familiar sidecut dimensions but those same dimensions get stupid with you shorten the length of where that widest tail, underfoot, widest tip points now span to keep them within the tapered parts of the ski. It completely ignores one of the big lessons of the spatula. Taper and rocker? Sure? A completely new way of thinking about sidecut? "Whoa hold on now, I don't know about that.......sounds scary"
Part of the reason that skis like the OG gotama, the dynastar XXL, the volkl explosiv and some others were popular is because they're really straight. It's not a reverse sidecut but it's closer to a reverse sidecut than what's on an S7/JJ etc. So even a traditional old straight ski is closer to not hooking than a lot of what's sold as 'powder skis' these days.
I bring all this up because even the popular Hjorleifsalphabet 4frnt skis take the rocker, take a TAD of the taper, but maintain a big turning radius by keeping the wide points out by the end. This gets rid of some of the stupid snowblade behavior on harder snow for sure. But in crusty, grabby natural snow, they're still just a little hooky without the extended long taper. I like skis like this (way more than the S7 style) but I think the hoji sounds so far like it's pretty much in the same vein as the EHP and Wren. Not a bad thing but not what I'm talking about.
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